I was going through the admin guide, and it was passed midnight (well, just like now). I played around with the admin site, as I noticed something strange - a poll I added with today's date (the new day), returned False in the was_published_today method.

I figured something funny is going on, so I played with the date hierarchy, and strangely (but expected), the hierarchy thing did not count this Poll object as today either - in fact, I had to go all the way back to This month filter to see it (I guessed the Today and Passed 7 days use a different checking method which involved a faulty subtracting, where as the This month and This year just compares).

I added useful screen shots - The date can be found at the top right of the screen, and the time (fuzzily) at the bottom (thank god for KDE's awesome plasmoids).

I strongly suspect that there is a timezone configuration issue here. The giveaway is that when you're on the 'today' filtering page, it's showing articles created on the 13th, even when the system clock says the 14th.

Django's default configuration file sets the timezone to America/Chicago, and this will affect the data stored in the database. If you're in a timezone ahead of Chicago (which is to say, most of them) your system clock will say it's the 14th, but Django and the database stack will say it's the 13th. If you're in a timezone behind Chicago, the opposite will happen.

If you set your settings.TIME_ZONE setting to your local timezone, the problem should go away.